In the Time of the 13th Incarnation
by cybermat
Summary: Without Amy, the Doctor still travels alone. An estranged lover whose ex- swore he looked an awful lot like Eleven (she looked like Amy (or was it River?)) receives a surprise visit from the Doctor after the Season Seven finale with a request for help on a very dangerous mission involving a future regeneration. And the Angels...
1. Chapter 1

**In the time of the 13****th**** incarnation (part One)**

**I**

I had finished watching the finale of season seven of _Doctor Who_, and, like any good fan, had wept. I hadn't wept like that since Adric died, actually. I surfed on to Facebook and found user comments. Some of them were lamenting the fact that it hadn't ended more tragically, more violently, that it was too predictable.

Did they even register the pain in the doctor's face, I wondered, when he lost Amy, in the moment of that final goodbye? Had they ever lost someone close to them? Where was their sympathy for the Doctor?

I had, of course, because I, in such a big way, had screwed up. But hey: I was just a 30 year old guy and Doctor Who fan, hence, a total loser, alone again on a Saturday night, just as I had been for the previous year. Now that the show was over, I felt a sense of closure, I supposed. The Doctor had lost Amelia Pond and Rory (actually, she had signed off 'Amelia Williams' for emphasis in her afterward to River's book, hadn't she?); I had lost…Amelia. Of this much, I was certain.

I was also certain that the Doctor had led me to Amelia in the first place. Let me explain.

I live in Florida. I was born and raised here. I went to school elsewhere, but I moved back for a job as a professor last year. After interviewing for the position near Orlando, on the plane back, I watched the first episode of the sixth season, "The Day of the Moon." And, for the first time in all my viewing, the TARDIS actually landed in Florida—at Cape Canaveral! I was amazed at the coincidence. The Doctor, naturally, would have to come here eventually, especially to Florida when the dreams of the space age were as new as a 1960's era Apollo rocket.

I watched the moonlight on the wing, thought of the dark space coast below as I flew over it, thought about the Doctor with the green lens flare around his sonic screwdriver in the Arizona night desert. There were endless possibilities. This was nothing short of destiny.

So, when I got the job, I was thrilled. Florida always seemed to me to be full of promise. Just stepping out into the airport, with the sunset pouring in through the windows flooding the terminal and the perfumed interiors, all the buildings new, was not like the cities of the Northeast, with their residue of use. Some kids ran off the plane before me, into the light of late afternoon, a pink light that passed through the palm fronds, over the tarmac, refracted through the glass of the terminal. I felt filled with an endless feeling of optimism!

The Doctor, I was certain, had led me here.

**II**

How quickly things changed. Within a little more than three months of arriving, I met her. I met her on an internet dating website. She liked my hair. She was a hairdresser. We were both big Doctor Who fans. I asked her what she thought the scariest episode was. She said "Midnight." I hadn't seen it, but heard it was good, that and an episode called… "Blink." Could I teach her anything about the show? What was my scariest episode? Ah, that was a good one. "Image of the Fendahl." Glow-in-the-dark skulls. _I like everything you are saying_, she said. We met, for the first time, at a lovely French café, in the evening not long before Christmas time. I was nearly an hour late. I had gone, unfortunately, to the wrong park in another city. I apologized copiously. She forgave me.

Our romance budded. The first time I went to her apartment I was immediately confronted by an enormous portrait of the Tenth Doctor, his eyebrow cocked skeptically (and, strangely, an equally large portrait of Robert Smith, complete with glow-in-the-dark eyes on the adjoining wall). We got sushi together, stayed at her place and watched some of the first season. I had never finished it. Graduate school got in the way. A million things got in the way. I had been too enthusiastic to ever watch "The Parting of Ways," you see, because Doctor Who, to me, had taken on a kind of religious dimension. I had to be ready to watch, and somehow…I never could watch, never felt ready enough, and thus could never really move on to subsequent seasons. It was too much to see it resurrected after watching it my youth, perhaps. Too intense, too magical somehow, because I felt that the Doctor was watching.

We also watched zombie movies and cuddled, as the T-shirt says. Made out on the couch. She stopped, and smoothed back my lapels of my grey corduroy jacket, as if gently smoothing out the contours of my mind.

She said I looked like Matt Smith, took pictures of me after straightening my hair and put them on the internet. She wanted me in a bowtie; how could I say no? She had various sonic screwdrivers and wanted to take a picture of me wielding one. I did so, shyly.

But I did things to sabotage our relationship. I was late, sometimes by a half hour, to pick her up. I didn't mean to be, I just have problems with time. Anyway, she still seemed to forgive me. We walked along the street, holding hands in Winter Park. She was openly holding hands with me and I could barely believe it. When it started to pour, we dashed through a rainstorm. We were soaked. We kissed, made out like bandits in the car.

After arriving back at her apartment, she casually remarked that the rain might was having an ill effect on her and we would have to cancel the concert we were going to. She had told me about her condition, and I agreed at first without protest. But something in me could not accept it. I had spent a lot (at least on my budget) for the show. I had been in relationships before where I felt used or rather she was so beautiful that I felt insecure that she might so casually disregard me. I scolded her. She should be more considerate. She bowed her head, dropped her eyes. Needless to say, I regretted my statement almost immediately. I saw her body seizing up. I rubbed her shoulders. I wanted to help. I lay with her on her bed. I registered her frustration, and her distress. I stayed with her that night. In retrospect, I realized that I was the one who disregarded her: why had I not taken steps to better understand her condition?

When we had sex for the first time and it was mind blowing. It was after watching a film about exorcism and it felt as though she were being exorcised. I remember the black satin sheets that are now emblazoned in my memory banks. But then a couple weeks later she left me alone for Valentine's Day. I wasn't sure how to interpret this. She sent me a text on Valentine's Day from Jacksonville where she was visiting friends saying she was thinking of becoming a Domme. This was just too much, too hot. I almost lost it. But I thought okay, sure, whatever you want.

Things had changed. When next I visited, we watched _Bram Stoker's Dracula_ and had intense sex. Before we did, I don't know why I did this—partly to make her jealous in retribution for being left alone on Valentine's Day, partly because I felt guilty, partly because I didn't want to have anything between us and this was my way of opening up, of laying myself bare and revealing my flaws—I told her what I'd done the weekend after Valentine's Day.

Here's what I did. I figured if she was going to run off and leave me to visit with friends, then I would do the same. _Prick love for pricking_, that's what I say. So I travelled to Sarasota to visit some old friends, including one with whom I had had an intense emotional bond. Since we were visiting our two mutual friends who were married, she and I naturally fell back into a kind of closeness. We held hands on the beach, but I got paranoid when our friend started taking pictures of us with his new high-end camera. That night, after visiting, I drove her back home to her parents' house and stayed the night. In the morning, she came into the room I was sleeping in just after I woke up and I gave her a massage, admittedly, seminude. It felt wrong. Though I loved my friend, I missed Amelia. I wanted to go home.

Amelia was not pleased. Still, we fucked like rabbits. In the throes of passion, I declared that I'd been searching for her my whole life. It made sense: I was the Doctor, and she was River. Or Amy. One. Or both. I wasn't sure. I was just really turned on by the way she moved, and the way she looked at me.

The next day, she broke it off out of the blue. Via text.

I was caught totally off guard. I sat there at my desk at 5:56 pm frozen like a stone statue.

I realized that she had already broken it off the night before when we were in the bathtub after we had sex. In the tub, a lukewarm bath (this was the only temperature she could tolerate), I remember being tired, very tired, totally spent, from my move, from the job, from the sex and the emotional intensity brought on by the vampire movie. I was overwhelmed by my resemblance to the Doctor, her projection onto me, and mine onto her, of a Time Lady, the whole convergent constellation of our media. I just wanted to lie down next to her and feel at peace. I remember tenderly scooping the lukewarm water into my hands and pouring it over her naked body, over her flesh, shoulders and breasts, and she looked at me and told me we had to stop, we couldn't do this, that it was hurting her. She said that I was like a gray screen. After being so intimate, she looked at me and it was like there was just nothing there.

"You're very good at faking it, in public, at being social. But when it comes down to it, there's nothing there. You aren't really interested in me. You just wanted to fuck me." I heard the gray screen part. I had agreed with her as I rinsed her naked body, that I felt as though I were a computer that had just been rebooted—DOS prompt, that's what I had called it. But I had not heard the rest, about not doing this anymore and that it was hurting her, not until the next day, at 5:56 in the afternoon at my desk, via text, when time stopped and I turned to stone.

**III**

I had not moved from that spot all the way through summer, and, as we entered fall, all through the new season of Doctor Who. It was like my grief at her loss transported me to another world. Lamentations. Crying. Crying at the breakfast table alone, with the green tablecloth and clock, and the sunlight falling obliquely through the glass panes. Fearing every breath would be my last, I thought I might drown in every glass of water. Crying down on my knees in a cold shower, praying for forgiveness, bargaining with God for her return, asking the angels, Jesus, and the Doctor.

Yes, I asked the Doctor for help—as I assumed him to be an archangel, or perhaps a Bodhisattva, depending on faith, or both. I felt his hand on my shoulder as I wept. Most of all, I prayed to reverse the hurt that I had caused her, through my confession of infidelity, and by openly admitting that I wanted to control her, because I did in my darkest heart. I wanted to contain and control her. I was jealous, and she was asking me to open up to her, and I did—I told her everything that came into my head, everything good and bad, just to get it out. But I realized too late that to her, opening up was sharing history—pictures, telling me about past loves and experiences. She had been trying to communicate her experience to me with urgency and I didn't listen. I was the one who disregarded her, after all. I disregarded what she had to say as so much sentimentality. The past, history, was unimportant to me. What mattered was that we were together, and that I was able to unburden myself to her, of the entire contents of my head, all my light and darkness. None of that other stuff really mattered anymore. But she didn't see it that way.

Or, by saying I wanted to control and manipulate her, objectify her, I was, indeed, attempting to manipulate, to control, psychologically by mixing lies with truth. We were like Count Dooku and Ventress—but who was the apprentice, and who was the Master? Who would gain the upper hand remained to be seen. I had been hurt before, and so I was feeling insecure. This was how it manifested. She couldn't possibly love me, and so I needed to play games with her.

But these attempts all backfired. With a simple stroke of a few virtual keys, she dispatched me as Obi Wan dispatched the Sith on the fire planet. I found myself torn, broken, dismembered, badly burned, in need of a cybernetic suit.

More than that, I was simply mean. Mean for the sake of being mean—teasing her, even knowing how vulnerable she was. And I hadn't listened when she tried to urgently communicate a message of understanding. Why? Why, when she was so beautiful? I could only conclude that, in the brief chance I was given to show her I cared, I had squandered it by being arbitrarily cruel.

Thus, I prayed to the Doctor for forgiveness. Ha! Breaking a commandment, no less. Though perhaps the Doctor was an Archangel of some sort…or was he a gnostic demiurge?

Things became more complicated when she travelled to New York that spring and I happened to discover that Doctor Who was shooting in Central Park. I passed her this information. She attended to the shoot. I marveled. How did she know to show up in NYC just when Doctor Who was being shot? It boggled my mind. Ah, Amelia, with all of space and time at his fingertips, the Doctor decided to have a picnic in Central Park on the same weekend as you visited! Or, perhaps Amelia (my Amelia) had been playing with me all along. Was she really River Song? Was she a Time Lady, after all? Or perhaps Amy Pond? (Her name, after all, was coincidentally, Amelia.) Did that make me the Doctor? Did it make me Roary? I had actually run into Arthur Darvill once myself during an outtake shoot randomly in the East Village the previous year. This was while he was playing video games at a hot dog store, no less.

"What are you filming?" I inquired.

"Doctor Who," said the director, looking on as Arthur played his game.

I was dumbfounded. "That's my favorite show!" But I didn't even recognize the character, since I had been in graduate school and didn't have television. I confessed this to her.

"Well," she said, suddenly indignant, "you'll just have to catch up then." And then Arthur thanked them for the hotdog (the 'Chihuahua') and left.

Now Amelia was in Manhattan watching them shoot, perhaps meeting the cast herself! But there were rumors, however, that the Ponds were in danger. There were evil angels about. Someone would not survive. I wept. I prayed on my knees for Amelia to be happy, for me to let go, for her to forgive me, for me to forgive myself, for the Doctor to stop worrying about me and save Amy and Roary from the Angels!

He was with me. I knew it. A number of them were, a number of his incarnations. I could feel them supporting me through these dark hours and days. (Notably, the Tenth doctor was not there. He was cross with me for hurting Amelia and didn't think I deserved sympathy. Why the Eleventh Doctor came to my rescue, I could not be certain. Perhaps he had some purpose in mind…)

In any event, after a torturous summer and diminishing contact with Ameila, I eventually decided it was best to cut off all communication. That brings me to here, now. The fall season finale for season seven, as I write this. It was over. I registered the lamentations of the Doctor as my own, the cry of grief as Amy vanished, the TARDIS blue against the gray of the city—with the mist rising from the graves in the foreground like vespers, souls from glass vials, the city skyline in the background a reflection of those graves. (I had observed this scene myself once upon a time, while riding in a taxi on the way to LaGuardia on the BQE, in the early morning mist of New Year's Day—the buildings, like massive gravestones, I thought.)

TARDIS blue against the backdrop of gray city skyline in mist, gravestones, souls—gray screen.

The Angels. I shuddered.

Thus the season ended. Which was why it was so strange when I found myself in the TARDIS control room suddenly, face to face with the Eleventh Doctor himself.

**IV**

I was confronted with the Doctor, with my idol and my imaginary friend of many years. "What am I doing here?"

"Parasocial interaction," he enunciated, moving around the console. It was Matt Smith, after all. But he was wearing black—a long black jacket, over his normal attire. And the control room itself was different. It, too, was black, more resembling the earlier designs from the 1970's and 80's, of the Tom Baker and Peter Davison years. The octagonal console itself had returned, and the walls with their rows of circular depressions. But this was different now, because instead of white the surfaces, panels, of the console were alternately black and white. And the walls themselves were dark grey. The circular holes glowed with an inner whiteness. It seemed to me, like a checkered suit of a storm trooper from Star Wars, the plastic panels like their armor.

And all at once, it was different again. I watched it morph and change before my eyes, into the Victorian secondary TARDIS control room of the Tom Baker years. The walls were mahogany, but black this time. I watched the contours of the octagonal console melt into the small wooden console with the singular rings, the time cylinder, but silver, platinum now. I watched the walls melt into black wooden paneling, which reflected grimly from out of darkness.

"Mourning," I whispered, "that's how you express your grief."

"The TARDIS responds this way to my sadness. For having lost, my…only friend. My best friend. And alone again."

But with its dark colors, this was more like the Master's TARDIS, I thought. I shivered.

"New desktop theme," he smiled.

"What did you mean, parasocial interaction?"

"Well, you should know," he said. "You're a professor of media. Parasocial interaction, or the rather strange notion that people develop relationships with TV personalities—newscasters, East Enders. You get the point. You talk about television characters as if they are real people, about news anchors as though they were a friend of the family. Strange bunch, humans. So lonely, in many respects. Not unlike me, I suppose."

Here in the obsidian control room, I worried a little about the Doctor. How long had it been? It was only a few minutes for me. Perhaps he had been traveling alone for some time now. Years. Decades. Perhaps he had not heeded Amy's parting words, that he should never travel alone.

"I have travelled for centuries alone, without Amy," he said, reading my thoughts.

"You shouldn't have, you know. She told you that you need a companion. You need to travel with others. You lose site of yourself otherwise."

He stood now, by the TARDIS, and I could see he was wearing his normal tweed jacket, but it was covered with a black trench coat. And he wore a bright green bowtie, oddly, one that matched the shimmer of his screwdriver. He stood upright, which was an uncommon stance for the Eleventh Doctor. He stood upright and suddenly became very still.

Perhaps, if I had been true to myself all those years I could have been more recognizable to her. I meditated on that thought.

"You have a good heart. And you're compassionate. You are passionate, too. But you lost her. You lost Amelia. I did a lot of work to bring you two together. I trusted you with her, and you…"

"You brought us together? You _did_?"

"Does it confirm your suspicions? Weren't you reading the signs? Hidden messages in the TV programming. This is not a coincidence. And now that you have lost her, I'm sorry… I'm afraid can only do so much. The rest is up to you, and it's one of life's great tragedies, I suppose." And he looked away for an instant, and in that instant, I registered…a complex universe of emotion, some pain there, a little reflection.

"You helped me. Why?"

"Because you were drowning," he said. "In your sorrow, and your desire for her."

"Then you were there! It was you. I felt it. I felt your hand on my shoulder. You came when I called to you, when I—"

"Prayed for me? _To me?_ What, do you think I am God?"

"They call you the Lonely God."

He was silent.

"I am not a God. I'm a Timelord. There's a difference."

"Then you're an angel of some sort, a…a Bodhisattva like they describe in Buddhism!"

He didn't answer.

"How and why am I here?" I approached him around the console. I walked right up to him and grasped him by the shoulders. "Why were you kind to me? Why did you even help me after what I've done?"

"Because, as I said," he spoke quietly, compassionately even, smiled a little, "you have a good heart after all. You may…not be the most trustworthy or decent individual. Thinking about some of the things you've done—and I know all about you—I must say that you are not my first pick for a companion. You can be cowardly and incredibly selfish. I mean, some of the things you said to her…And given her circumstances, too. You should be ashamed. Yes, I'll admit it. I thought perhaps I shouldn't help you. Perhaps I should let you die—wallow and drown in your own shallow self-pity. Perhaps, I thought, I should even kill you myself. I didn't know.

"You're worse than Turlough," he added. "I mean, really, really just…totally untrustworthy. Yes, I thought I might even kill you myself, ok? Because of what you did to her, to Amelia. She is very dear to me. And you, you were like a bull in a bloody China shop!"

"So it was true after all, she's—"

"Yes, she is River. And also Amy. It's complicated. Afterimages, aspects of their personalities. Like line spectra of diffracted light. They were the same…person, after all. Just like—"

"Just like I'm some sort of afterimage of you?"

"Time and space is a complicated thing. Have you ever heard of EPR phenomena? It's a consequence of quantum physics, and a pointed critique of quantum mechanics, I might add. So-called quantum non-locality.

"Two particles that are entangled will have states—spin, charm, strange—that are entangled. If you observe one here, on this side of the universe, then the other entangled particle, no matter how far, away—on the other side of the universe—will change its state. It will have the exact complimentary state. If this one is up, the other is down, and so on. It would be as if you were observing different colored balls, and when you opened the box and found one was white, the other would be definitely black, but not until you observed them! That means that both balls, both particles, are linked, must always compliment one another. That means that every possible observation is encoded in the particles—its almost as though they know how they will be observed! That's how Bohr would have explained it, yes! And it's regardless of where they are. They could be on the other side of the galaxy, the universe!"

"That's not possible."

"It's real. It's the way the universe functions." He flashed a grin. He wheeled back toward the console. "It's faster than light communication."

"Why are you telling me this? What's this got to do with Amy, with Amelia, with both of them? You still haven't told me how or why I am here."

"Parasocial interaction my dear boy!" He was calling me a boy, but ironically, he was now the younger man. "Parasocial interaction. In a universe with such vast expanses, that cannot even be traversed by light speed travel, where, beyond the incident light from stars not yet born, not yet known on earth, there is a Void, darkness, blackness, somehow, among it all we must communicate! And you are a Doctor of Communication, no? You should be able to follow. That is, faster than light communication, in media, in images, in dreams, and dream images. I am the Doctor, I have appeared here before you now, do you understand me."

"I don't understand."

"Well, go to the local library and check out some books by Stephen Hawking. You're a bright boy, you can figure it out."

"You're saying that parasocial interaction has something to do with the EPR paradox of faster than light travel."

"There we have it! Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, oldest trick in the book, so called 'spooky action at a distance' that Einstein never really liked all that much, gave him the willies. I know, I had to talk him down the night he figured it out, believe me that was no easy task—don't want to have to deal with a paranoid Einstein. It was in his library—"

"What do you mean by action at a distance?"

"He totally looked like he had cracked!"

"So somehow, your action halfway across the universe is affecting me?"

"Yes, that's it! Good work my boy! You have a budding physicist in you yet!"

"You're saying that you're able to travel here using signals that are faster than light!"

"Yes! Utilizing EPR technology I can use the TARDIS to access the parasocial interactions of humans, of screens, and also, reveries, imaginings. This is all taking place in a kind of imaginary space. I don't really exist. You're smart enough to know that. But you're also smart enough to know that it doesn't really make any difference, does it? I mean, just look at where you live: Disney World. Who can blame you for losing sense of the boundary between fantasy and reality!"

"So that's why this is all happening right after I watched the season finale? And that's why one minute I was in my living room eating a snack, and the next I was here, with you? EPR phenomenon. And Imaginary Space."

"Oh, come on. Do you really expect extra-terrestrials of sufficiently advanced technological capability to wait around using light-speed travel in order to visit? Especially when you're causing so much mischief? We use EPR phenomenon. Time Lords can surf quantum waves like it's nobody's business. We can reappear in your dreams, in your imagination, through your media systems—which are, after all, only the sum of a vast mass hallucination, of your collective dreaming—to reach you! The quantum states in your brain, collapsing, revealing—_Me! Ta-da!_ We have reached you! _And_ I even got you a girlfriend briefly for just vaguely resembling me, which is a great fete, two birds with one stone!"

"But you said the particles have to be entangled…"

"You've got to admit that getting you a girlfriend in the process was pretty brilliant."

"They have to be _entangled_!" I repeated. "That means that you would have had to originate them somehow."

"We are Time Lords, after all. And yes, we have been watching over humanity for a very, very long time."

"You really miss her, don't you," I said all at once. "A TARDIS in black bereavement is more like the Master's TARDIS, isn't it? You travelled alone too long. You should have listened to her."

He dropped his gaze, overcome with sadness, as I had been, all those many nights, weeping, shivering, praying—for him, for Amy and Roary, for her…

For an Angel to forgive my sin.

"Maybe I saw my own grief reflected in you. For all your faults, you are still good deep down, and…for all my brilliance, I still couldn't save Amy." He bit his lower lip, averted his gaze, hands gripping the console. "Now, you will come with me. For all your faults, as I said you are worse than Turlough even, less trustworthy, and not very brave, not even very compassionate—still, your heart is big. Somehow, within you, you are infinitely disappointing, and infinitely redeemable. Chaos in motion. For the time is coming. In the decades of my mourning, I felt myself slipping, you see. I felt, bitter. Bitter toward humanity. Like she said, avoiding Earth. It may be a while before I return. Especially to New York...

"I stood, silently, as silent and still as one of the weeping angels, mourning in the very spot where they disappeared, where she disappeared. My dear friend, my confidant who kept me honest, feeling myself growing grayer…knowing I would never see her again. In that moment, torn away so totally and completely.

"One morning, after River called me away again, called me back to the TARDIS, in the gray mist rising over the graveyard, and over the city, like haze over a forest, over treetops, I realized that I had to move forward. I had to return to the TARDIS. I let River pilot it. I was in no condition to do so. But a TARDIS always fares so much better in the competent hands of a Time Lady, after all…

"I had heard your cries, your pleas, well before that. Over the past year, crying out in a cold darkness, just like I heard…her calling to me. Your Amelia."

"My God," I muttered, "please tell me that my mourning was not too much of a burden, that being there for me did not prevent you from being able to save Amy."

He looked at me and smiled wistfully, "I have to believe that I could have saved her, just as you must believe that you had a chance with Amelia—your Amelia—and that you lost her. It is the tragedy of this life."

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"Certainly, you took up some of my time."

"You were very brave," I said. "For her, and for me. I was drowning, and you helped to rescue me."

"You were literally drowning," said the Doctor. "In the black Void of your sorrowful mind."

I felt puzzled. I looked at the Doctor. "I saw you," I said to him, "in that Void, in that darkness, holding back the pain and sorrow for me, selflessly. You could have drowned! Regeneration won't save you from drowning!"

"I have two hearts," he smiled. "And you were able to control your anger, and your frustration—with yourself, with her—and your loneliness, and the sorrow. In time, get it back under reign, just like when she smoothed your lapels, no?"

"Did you see that, too? Is there nothing you can't see, Doctor?"

"No. And I saw you two in the rain."

Time Lords are like Universal Surveillance, I thought. But I bit my tongue.

"You could have been more sensitive. When she relapsed."

I hung my head, dropped my gaze to the TARDIS floor.

He returned to his work at the TARDIS control panel. "Smoothing your ruffled heart, before you began the long, lonely task of putting yourself back in order, learning to conduct yourself with dignity. The dignity you scarred in her is reflected in your own lost face; but you're learning. You realized that, instead of wallowing, you should put your power into writing, into the power of your own voice. That Voice is everything, and it is the one thing that—for all your faults, redeems you, in her eyes, and in mine, and in your own. Your imagination.

"Besides, it's alright," he continued. "You were actually very brave, too, in your own way and…you were suffering. Bereaved, just as you could see I was. And I, after all, am kind. And so are you—despite your meanness, deep down. Which is why I need you—for a very dangerous mission. More dangerous than any that I have encountered in a long time. I need you now because something has gone dreadfully wrong with my time sequence, with one of my incarnations. I need you, because you have a good heart, deep down, and because you have a dark mind…"


	2. Chapter 2

**In the Time of the 13****th**** Incarnation (part two)**

**I**

In the intervening months, I had pondered, many times: if only I could return to New Year's Day.

On New Year's Eve, I had been late again to visit Amy. This time, however, I felt I had a more justifiable excuse. I had gone for a long walk in the nature preserve at dusk, on the last day of the year. Though I knew that I would have to get on the road soon to visit her, I strayed far out along the path. In winter, certain birds congregated in the reeds of the swampy preserve, and they produced a cacophony in the distance. As I walked to the furthest point of the path before it turned into the dark woods, I spotted what I thought at the time was a pair of foxes. I stood still, observing them, maintaining a respectful distance. It was a pair, and they matched the amber twilight in their honey coats. I watched them scamper into the woods. On the threshold, one paused to look back, then followed after her mate, disappearing into the darkness.

I had explained this to Amy when I visited. When I woke up in the middle of the night and started writing it down. She walked into the living room to make sure that I was still there and held me. I embraced her, resting my cheek and ear against her belly through the T-shirt. She needed me, at that moment. The sound of concern in her voice when she first called to me led me to believe she might have been afraid that I had left in the middle of the night. I sensed that and it made me feel powerful, for a second, as though I had the upper hand. A painting of Robert Smith loomed in the darkness behind me, his special glow-in-the dark eyes, while the Ikea ghost light in the kitchen cast a weird blue light. It was just around the corner. Deep down I needed her as much if not more.

After Amy went back to bed, when I was done writing, Robert Smith's glowing eyes startled me in the round mirror on the opposing wall as I stood.

How I wished, in the year that followed, that I could return to that moment. After we hung out on New Year's she came down with pneumonia, which more or less incapacitated her for a couple weeks. In that time, exchanging periodic txt msgs and I understood she was hanging out with some other dude (a millionaire, apparently, and genius, but no social skills) so I didn't want to appear clingy.

FF to late January, I drove an hour to visit again. First, she straightened my hair and insisted that she take pictures. I looked an awful lot like Matt Smith, she said (and, I had to admit, she reminded me of Amy (or was it River?)). In any event, she would post them to Instagram. We are making out on her bed. Reach back...behind the...pillows...grab the...bondage tape MWAHAHAHA and she was like 'how did you know'? I go to the other room and get my little pink XOXO paddle and I begin tapping her a** I'm like 'OK, name ten of the actors who have played doctor.' She wonders how this will be possible but this is a distraction and she gets free because I've never really used PVC tape before.

Now I'm the one who is pinned and I think we might be about to get to third base but I stop her and ask if she really sees me as a 'friend'? I don't know why I do this and it ruins the mood. She returns from the bathroom and asks if I know what I want from her, point blank.

When I hesitate, she says, "You don't know, do you?"

Then I ask her if she wants to be my girlfriend. She's great and I figure this is the decent thing to do given the circumstances, but I feel compelled to reveal that I may be living in Brooklyn for a couple months over the summer (which was true, I was considering this). I had no idea why I choose to divulge that particular piece of information at that point.

Amy was not satisfied by this one bit. She said, "How am I going to be your girlfriend if you're running around in Brooklyn over the summer with god knows what girls? Besides, I barely know anything about you. It's been a couple weeks since we talked on the phone, remember? How can I be your girlfriend if you never call and we never talk?"

She was right and I realized I hadn't called for two weeks while she had pneumonia.

So then we went and got some Ramen from 7-11. Amy turned heads in the aisles at 7-11, but her gaze remained fixed on me. When we returned home we read a book called "Kitten War" for an hour or so that compared different kinds of kittens and the readers had to decide who was cuter and thus the war frame. Then it was getting late so I had to return home. We embraced on the doorstep and she kissed me goodnight.

The next day I was in bed sick of course. I was supposed to be preparing lessons for my classes that began the following week but instead I was downloading shows on iTunes. But that wasn't really bothering me. What was bothering me was this: my main dilemma was that I _did_ want to live in NYC for a spell over the summer and be unattached. I'm still young, right? That was my reasoning. Of course, such adventures often end in disappointment for me because I'm abnormally shy. And actually, now that I'm writing it down I see how this would be fine to say if I were a 21-year-old college kid, but I'm a 33-year-old man. On the other hand, I still look like a college kid.

Then again, I met a really great girl that I had a connection with and because I chose to disclose and be truthful I felt I had to make a choice of some sort whether I wanted to commit to being her boyfriend, or just say I need some space. Of course, it was complicated by her condition. I lay there staring at the ceiling. Who knows, I thought? Does anyone ever really know? In any event, I had the presence of mind to vaguely register that I ran the risk of losing her. I had to resolve.

I didn't. Not in time. Now it was too late. I had squandered the affection of a very beautiful and very real woman in the pursuit of many, or rather, just the illusion.

**II**

All of this ran through my mind before the Doctor brought me back to earth. He, too, had been mourning.

"In the days following Amy's departure, I travelled to the largest graveyard in the universe, in all the universes. I wandered among the graves, with the mist swirling, like the spiral galaxies themselves, in the dark sky, a beautiful, mournful sight—a blue giant being swallowed by the largest black hole in the known universe, syphoned off into oblivion. And I sat among the graves."

"You said I climbed inside," I said. "You said I tried to climb into her mind."

"I couldn't cry," he continued, not taking note of what I'd said. "I just wandered among the graves, for days, for weeks, maybe months. I can't remember. I needed to be alone. I was alone—without River, without anyone, because I missed them so much. I missed my friends, my friend, that first face that this face had ever seen. Secretly, I wondered if the shrouded stone figures that I encountered were Angels. And I thought, at that moment, at that time, I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't mind at all. Wandering in that maze of death, I wouldn't have minded at all…"

He drifted off, and when he came to he said, "I never told anyone. I thought you might understand. Even though, on some level, I disdain you. Wonder if I can trust you. Your sorrow was complete, complex. Like mine. An aspect of me. Afterimage of my grief. You don't know exactly what it did to me. Maybe I'm talking to you because despite your callousness you're one of the best listeners ever, I don't know. I don't know anymore."

He paused. It meant a lot coming from him. I thought of the Doctor's cry as she vanished and all that was left was that chilling stone smirk. I imagined the casual, contemplative pause that Rory made to see his own death inscribed there on that stone. I glimpsed in them bereavement, my own loss. I heard my own cry of pain and lamentation in the Doctor's cry.

It occurred to me that, even now, I still tasted Amy on my lips. He had not been pleased with the spanking. He had seen that, too. "You would, wouldn't you?" He peered at me Cross the TARDIS console.

"Misery loves company is it?"

"Right now," he said, "you're one of the most miserable wretches in the universe, and so am I. So yes."

He opened the monitor onto a field of blackness, a blue star spiraling into oblivion. "That graveyard that I found is the largest in the universe and, fittingly, it is also on a planet orbiting the blue giant being siphoned off into the largest black hole ever."

So, after Amy, the TARDIS was literally orbiting a black hole and, through the monitor, I contemplated whether even the TARDIS would survive _that_.

"You have no idea the feeling of wandering in that labyrinth of graves for who knows how long feeling the death could be right behind you and being frightened but never looking back. So if you wish to thank me for being there for you, now, I am asking you to be here for me."

Why bring me here? By virtue of my intimacy with her, did I still retain some connection to her, some residue of her being? I doubted it. But then why not bring Amy—my Amy—if, after all, we were some kind of afterimages of the Doctor and Amelia Pond? Perhaps, as with the real Amy, it was impossible to bring her afterimage, too, by some virtue of the laws of Angels and space-time.

"At the heart of that graveyard," he said, turning to me, "there is reflecting pool. I was on hands and knees by that pool staring at my own reflection, and behind me, the reflection of the star—or rather the absence of any reflection in that black pool. The whole image gently perturbed by the merest ripple."

Shaking his head, hands rising to cover eyes (like the Angels themselves), in slow motion, cascade of tears falling anti-gravity through his palms, to lightly disturb the calm water.

In the slight perturbation of his forehead I registered the merest sign of grief, The look of hurt in his eyes as if the man himself had descended into that black Void, read between the lines of that resigned stare after finishing her afterward, through her glasses. Then it was abyssal. Though still profound, my grief suddenly seemed to be a mote in comparison. I shuddered to think of the Lonely God in such a state, descending into that Darkness.

Had he finally come up against a force of Nature—a race—that he could not control, glimpsed in that stone cold smile. Perhaps the Angels were the Timelords, and this was their revenge? I felt a shiver run down my spine.

I looked to the Doctor, but he was preoccupied by the Void. Would he also succumb?


	3. Chapter 3

**In the Time of the 13****th**** Incarnation (part three)**

**I**

"You said I climbed inside," I repeated. "That I tried to climb inside her mind."

Finally, I succeeded in diverting his attention from the black hole on the screen, but there was a far-gone look in his gaze that I found eerily disconcerting. Again, a slight chill went down my spine.

"As I said, two entangled quantum particles have states that are linked. The particles have the same origin, and no matter how distant if you affect the state of one, it's spin, color, strange, et cetera, then the other changes in response, instantaneously. That's 'spooky action-at-a-distance.' Faster than light travel."

I didn't say anything, didn't wish to interrupt him, but glanced myself at the monitor, at the spectacular emptiness and the doomed star. I felt cold suddenly as if there were a wind picking up. In my mind's eye, I envisioned the corridors of the TARDIS, disembodied perspective floating down them. They were seemingly endless. I could see the paneling, feel the textures, and then…around a curve the contours seemed to change, the paneling different, blacker, hoses and wires emerging from the walls, not exactly Timelord technology…

"Heisenberg's principle. You've heard of it, I suppose?"

I nodded. "That's the uncertainty principle, right?"

"Very good. Do you understand its implications?"

"Yes," I said with some confidence.

"Then explain it to me." He had returned to the console again and began setting coordinates.

"Well," I began, "from what I can recall, according to quantum mechanics particles no longer act like particles when you get down to the subatomic level. They act like waves. It's the wave-particle duality. That was one of the genius ideas of the early architects of quantum mechanics. The paradox of the atomic world can be resolved by saying that sometimes a particle acts like a particle, and sometimes it acts like a wave."

"I'm impressed," he said, not looking up at me. "Go on."

"So as a consequence of this uncertainty when we observe matter at the subatomic level, the particles that make it up act more like waves. That means that the actual position of a particle may be spread out over a given area. In other words, you can't know both the particle's location and its velocity simultaneously."

"Technically, it's momentum, _ρ_."

"We're under attack by Weeping Angels. Why are you quizzing me on this right now?"

"Just keep talking," he said.

"Alright. You can't know the location and momentum of a subatomic particle simultaneously, and neither can you know the energy and time simultaneously. Precise measurement of either position or energy results in uncertainty in the measurement in the momentum or time, respectively."

"And that's not just a limitation on instruments," he added. "It's not merely the idea that scientists cannot observe a physical system without affecting it; the uncertainty is a physical limitation on our ability to observe the universe at its fundamental levels, a law firmly governed by Planck's constant."

I had forgotten that aspect of it. "Yes, I guess you're right." He always had to be right.

"Normally this effect is limited to the quantum world," he began. "Subatomic particles can have a fuzzy location if we know their momentum—velocity, speed—but that does not happen in the classical world, even though, hypothetically speaking, everything—you, me, that galaxy out there—can also function as a wave _and_ a particle. We also have some degree of uncertainty associated with us as human_oids_, though it is vanishingly small.

"You think that I've summoned you here just to listen," he said, "but you're wrong. You've got another thing coming, and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry to have to tell you this."

I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

"Remember I said the Angels immediately turn to stone when observed and this is called quantum-lock? That is because they are quantum creatures," he said. "When you see them, when they are observed, we know their position but we cannot know their momentum, their movements. Similarly, we know their energetic state—cold stone—but we can't pin them down precisely in _time_. That's the quantum-lock. They are in-between creatures that live in the no-man's land between the classical, mechanical world and the world of subatomic particles. They are evidence of quantum behavior bleeding into the world of the everyday.

"This is how they 'kill' you: they send you back in time, feeding off you _time-energy_, that is, making your lifespan more uncertain, they thereby absorb _energy_. Do you understand? It's not that they send you back in time, necessarily. You still exist in your original time. It's just that they consume your energy, thereby obfuscating the probability wave of your time dimension. Suddenly, you're more likely to exist in another epoch, and the longer you've been dead the bigger the feast!

"Angels are by nature quantum creatures," he continued, "but this also means that they exist at the boundary between moments in time. They are creatures of discontinuity—they emerge from the spaces between moments in time that cannot be observed. That's their real origin. That's something that I never mentioned before because I didn't want to scare my companions. That means they cannot only send you back in time, but also into oblivion, into the discontinuity between the measurements of time itself.

"And I'm so sorry to have to tell you this, but Amy, your Amy, has an Angel inside her. Just like Amy's ordeal on Alfava Metraxis in the labyrinth, she can feel the Angel coming."

"Then that is what you meant by me climbing inside her mind," I said at last, nearly paralyzed with terror. "All that cold and dark that she's experiencing is the feeling of falling into a discontinuity in time-space."

"Empathy, or as near as you can come to it," he said. "It's the feeling of an Angel climbing out from the deepest recesses of her mind. It happens very rarely. Usually at least you have the comfort of knowing where the person ends up. But, in this case, well…it was the consequence of watching the show, ironically. _The image of an Angel…_"

"It came through the television?" I shouted. "How could you allow that to happen?"

"I'm so sorry," he said. "Meanwhile, the quantum non-locality, 'spooky action-at-a-distance' allows them to move faster than light. They can move anywhere in the universe and obviously, they can fall upon you before you even know what happened."

"What do I have to do to save her?"

"Oh, that's not why you're here. It's not a possibility," he said. "There's nothing you can do to help her. No, you are to help me, and thereby redeem yourself. Now we're going there," and he pointed to a point on the blackness on the screen."

"What? I don't see anything. Do you think it's the Angels' home world?"

"They don't have a home world. Like I said, they are creatures of discontinuity. They come from in between time itself. Hard to imagine, I know, but trust me it's true. Now the star you see has just passed into the galactic plane, crossing over into an unimaginable void—a rift that holds at its center this supermassive black hole. There is a terrestrial planet orbiting the dying star, invisible to the naked eye. The planet is devoid of all life forms—except one. Angels. It's a labyrinth of Angels, and it's being sucked into that Void. If you will recall Winter Quay in Manhattan, it was a double-cross meant to ensnare me in a temporal prison while the Angels piloted my TARDIS into the black hole. They distracted me with Amy and Rory to once again try to steal my TARDIS. They want to use the TARDIS to create a temporal Void on a scale heretofore unseen in all of creation. The TARDIS contains the Eye of Rassilon, its beating heart. That's the entryway into the time continuum. Do you realize what would happen if they were to pilot that into a black hole of this size?"

"Some sort of time rift, I gather?"

"More than just some kind. It would produce a gravitational field powerful enough to swallow the entire galaxy, nullifying the galaxy."

"They want to feed off the time energy of an entire galaxy?" I asked.

"The resulting distortion of space-time would release an unimaginable quantity of time energy. Who knows how many Angels might be released from the Void? It's nothing short of a gambit for total universal domination—no, _multiversal_ domination! It terrifies me to think how close this entire dimension may have come to complete and utter annihilation. So that planet is our next stop."

**II**

Exiting the TARDIS, I was distraught to find that we had materialized in a black Void, a vast expanse of nothingness. The Doctor left the interior of the TARDIS dark as well (so as to not attract attention?). It was pitch black, an eerie silence in such overwhelming darkness.

We paused. And it was an eerie pause, there in the darkness, amid the vast expanse.

"It's as I knew it would be. We're in a void, far too large to comprehend. But over there, just up ahead…"

"Yes?"

He held his sonic screwdriver out to his side. I could see him in profile, in the green light. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

Then, he returned to the TARDIS and when he came back he produced a good length of rope. It was extending out from the TARDIS.

"That should hold fast."

"And now?" I said.

"Just you wait." He said. "He will be coming."

And just like that he leapt over the edge of the cliff, into the dark abyss, tethered, turning to face me as he descended (though not seeing me), focus intent on the descent, face aglow in the eerie green light of his sonic screwdriver.

"Doctor!"

Leaving me thus on the precipice. I ran to the edge. He had gone.

I saw him, in my mind's eye, his torque, the determination, as he descended. What was he doing? It had: the air of a dynamo about it, of the acceleration of locomotive engine wheels. Regeneration was—_Just one machine transforming into another_, that's what he had said. What had that meant?

_Just you wait. He will be coming._

I looked back. The rope was still coming out of the TARDIS. And then—

It ended!  
I heard it zip by, singing through the air.

"Doctor!" I watched it slip past helplessly. In my last moment, I gave a last, desperate grasp toward it, caught it and it sliced open my hand. I recoiled into myself. I watched it sail over the edge into that deeper darkness of the abyss. I ran to the edge, clutched the edge, the precipice. I called his name into that night. Nothing. Only a faint glimmer—green flash—and then…nothing. Gone.

For what could have been days, it seemed. I waited there, in that darkness. In that vast expanse, in the darkness and silence. With the TARDIS door ajar, but dark inside. I had no desire to enter. What had I done? Had I forced the doctor to commit suicide?! Why had he left me here and what was his purpose.

I thought of many things during that time alone. I thought of Amelia, not the Doctor's Amelia, my Amelia. I thought of the way she turned to me when we sat on her couch watching Doctor Who and zombie movies, how kind and hospitable she had been, and mostly, her blue eyes. I later read on her Instagram that they were of two different colors. Why hadn't I noticed? God is in the details; that's what Einstein said.

I would never forget the way she turned to me, how strange her eyes are.

I wondered who would care for her? What lucky man would it be, or would he deserve her? I worried that she would not find someone to care for her properly. More than anything, I wished her love.

**III**

When finally there was light, it came from the beacon at the top of the TARDIS, hurting my eyes after so much darkness. I was sitting in the doorway, on the threshold, just in case it might become necessary for me to dash back inside. He had, after all, left me in total darkness on a planet that was a hive of Weeping Angels.

I had barely slept, too, but the sound of the time cylinder jolted me into wakefulness. But it was the beacon on top of _this_ TARDIS. And then silence again.

Then someone emerged from the TARDIS from a surface where there surely was no door.

"You have done well—you're very brave."

"I'm sorry, Doctor is that you?"

"First of all, allow me to apologize for leaving you for so long here. I realize that it must have been an ordeal given that this place holds a labyrinth of Angels. Second, you are probably wondering what is going on. So please allow me to explain, and I hope you will excuse my younger, more irascible self."

A faint light—cold light, but increasingly strong like LED—blinked into being and I recognized, in the vapor of the atmosphere which played in the beam, that the man standing before me was not in fact Eleven but someone new.

"My previous self left the timing beacon of the TARDIS on and I used it as a homing device. In case of grave emergency, future (and past) regenerations can converge upon the TARDIS. It becomes a kind of trans-dimensional hub, a home base. Do you really think that my previous incarnation could have survived the ordeal without a little nudge from his future self? The man behind the curtain."

Eleven had received a tip from his future self. This Doctor was much different, and truthfully in retrospect I cannot remember what he looked like. It was a blur, and I believe he wiped my mind. But if I had to guess, judging from his demeanor, I would have imagined that he looked something like this: he was, perhaps, defined by his singular gauntness, and wan complexion. He had, in some respects, come full circle. Here was a tall, aged gentleman, with a narrow nose and dark circles beneath the clear gray eyes. His long silver hair was combed back and hung at his neck level. Unlike his Eleventh incarnation, this incarnation did not invite laughter. He did not play, neither was he animated. He was singularly grim. So very grim, and faded by centuries of travel. How long have you lived, Doctor? I wondered.

He withdrew a silver timepiece from his purple velvet vest, from beneath the long black coat.

There was at once an intense severity, and a resigned kindness in those gray eyes—a paradox of character that I had not glimpsed before in any mortal being. But was he truly mortal any longer? What had gone wrong, exactly with this incarnation? Yes, a simultaneous severity, and a great kindness, a great compassion behind those piercing grey eyes, set above the fine narrow nose. The wan complexion, and the noble stature.

Most certainly, he did not smile, or when he did, only faintly.

"Is this your last regeneration?" I asked point blank.

He didn't hesitate. "Yes, regardless of what my former self might have led you to believe. I am not omniscient, I do not have 507 lives or unlimited lives. This is not a video game."

"What is the universe like in your time?" Whatever 'your time' meant to someone like him.

"I have lived, so very long. So long that I have watched civilizations rise and fall. But, am I not like you? What's the difference between seventy years, a century, or a millennium or two? In the curve of these spiraling centuries, in the maddening order of my years, we are both just an eye blink in the motes of yawning galaxies, spiral arms hanging in the night, cushioned in it and dreaming, embracing us. What I've learned is that I'm not so wise. I know scarcely more than your humanity, scarcely more than you. And you are my friend."

"What became of Eleven?"

"He was resourceful. He survived the descent into that abyss," he said, gesturing toward the immense chasm behind me. "There's a labyrinth of Weeping Angels down there larger than any I've ever encountered in all my travels through the universes. And I will successfully sabotage their plans, creating a time rift that will zap all their remaining time energy. There was just one catch, as I recall."

"And that was?"

"I forgot to tie the other end of the rope."

I could hear the time cylinder start again and the beacon began flashing in the night. The door—the one I had come out of, dematerialized.

"Ah, okay, that would be previous myself summoning the TARDIS further down in the labyrinth, and so I'd say I'm just about done down there."

"I'm still not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do to help. Apparently I can't help Amy."

"Come with me," he said beckoning with his hand.

We entered the TARDIS. The paneling was still black retro-1980's with while circular recesses glowing, black obsidian console with circular mirrors on the time cylinder.

"We're returning to Winter Quay. One last thing to take care of to tie up this incredible mess."

With this he smiled gently, if only faintly, and fleetingly, and returned to his work at the TARDIS console programming coordinates.

**IV**

When we finally materialized it was in the upstairs hallway with the wooden paneling at Winter Quay.

"As soon as we emerge from the confines of this machine, my young man, it is near certain oblivion. Are you aware of the stakes?"

I nodded, terrified.

"Here's why you've been summoned."

Great, he would finally tell me.

We stepped outside the TARDIS. "I brought you here," he said, turning to face me, "because you're very empathic, you were able to breach a boundary in space time. In your will to really feel what she was feeling—fear, hopelessness, the dark cold place inside her where she felt alone."

"For a split second, I felt as though I had almost transported myself into her body."

"You almost assumed her consciousness," he said. "Humans have this saying that it's all connected. Well, in a sense it's true, since we all emerged from the Big Bang all of our particles are entangled. Not many species can make use of that fact. In fact, only one that I can think of, but you…you came close. How?"

What had that meant? It was unclear. But now we were in the hallway and it seemed, it was time to do to Winter Quay what Eleven was simultaneously succeeding in doing to the dark Angel planet hundreds of light years from here, a full-out assault on these universal super-predators to foil their schemes for total domination!

"Their plan was to distract me with Amy and Rory's double suicide. They knew I'd be too distracted to guard the TARDIS in the split-second before the paradox. I'll handle the Angels up here and the Statue of Liberty. Meanwhile, I want you to destroy the Angels on the landing and the lower floors. I want you to draw them all away from us and eliminate them."

_Take out an Angel army all by myself?_ Was he totally mad in his final incarnation? "Forgive me for saying this but your plan is worse than suicide!"

"While I'm asking you to fight ninety-nine percent of the Angels in here, and I admit that does seem a bit daunting, I'm confident that you can do it. Here's why: I can't actually match your ability to combat them."

"What could I possibly have to offer?"

"Just look inside," he said, smiling reassuringly, albeit with that hint of sadness. I could tell that, though centuries had passed, he was still haunted by traces of his loss. "Just as you tried to understand her, and what you did wrong. Go inside, learn to show yourself the same compassion you would show her. Look—"

"Doctor!"

He wheeled around. There was an Angel behind him, it's touch just a mere inch from his left shoulder. We both stared in terror.

"Then it's already begun," he said. "And if we're both looking in this direction now…"

I turned around. There was another Angel at the far end of the hall on my side. We couldn't make eye contact again, the Doctor and me.

"Remember what I said," he shouted, "about going inside. But don't forget the stakes. You might not even end up in the past. It could be a discontinuity—absolutely nothing."

"Doctor?"

That was it. Silence. I could no longer tell if he was behind me. Perhaps he had been killed. All I could see was the stone Angel in front of me, its faint smile. I could only do what he had told me to do. I had to make my way downstairs and somehow single-handedly defeat nearly all of the Angels myself, using some as yet unrealized special power. Give me some sort of simple sign, Doctor!

I charged the Angel. It couldn't move anyway, not as long as I was staring it down. Who knew what directions they would be coming from? Then again, who cared? Like any good villain, they were arrogant and so they seemed to enjoy this cat and mouse. So then let's play, I thought. Sudden death. Ducking past it I shot a backward glance. Even in the split second that it took me to turn and look back it was already right behind me only a foot down the hall, grasping for me.

I did not look back again but burst out onto the landing.

**V**

As I stepped onto the landing of the staircase, I immediately hesitated. There they stood, on each and every lower level, an Angel, certain doom. I felt, frozen, in indecision. I was not scared, exactly. Suddenly, I felt more a state of total indecision. I could return to the safety of the TARDIS. I was under no obligation to risk my life like this, or worse, I thought.

On the other hand, I could go forward. I could proceed into that…horrible uncertainty posed by the Angels. In bravery, in choice, resolve, to help the Doctor, to become a permanent part of his time sequence and reassert my brave role.

The light fell in through the window and cut obliquely across the stairs. Stairs and bars and stairs descending like an optical illusion, Muller-Lyer illusion of depth.

I was grossly disturbed, for it was not a state of fear, but rather, in the uncanny half-light through the windows falling obliquely through the interference pattern of lines—lines of MC Escher style staircase descending, of rails and rectilinear window panes, lines of shadow and verisimilitude—near total paralysis and indecision. Was this all there was in the world of the Angels? This optical illusion of overlapping lines, of black and white lines zigzagging back and forth—a godforsaken interference pattern, an optical illusion the only truth?

Had I been infected by the indecision of the Angel? I felt a doubt of Kierkegaardian proportions descending over me. I had turned to stone. It was not fear, nor was it merely indecision—it was ultimate uncertainty, as the Doctor had observed, utter paralysis and anhedonic lack of agency before the universe, a turning to stone, as if the mere presence of the Angels had drawn up this field of doubt within and around me.

I dared not take my eyes off them now. Somehow I made a motion toward that staircase, reflecting my fickle heart, the way I treated her. The external world was reflecting the internal. My heart was an angel staircase of treachery.

I descended through the death moiré of flight lines. Onward. Downward.

They were, after all, creatures of uncertainty. More than quantum lock, they existed by virtue of quantum uncertainty, mutual exclusivity of position and velocity, time and energy…creatures of discontinuity that could, in theory, send you not merely back in time, but plummeting into a fissure in the fabric of space-time itself. Super-predators of the universe.

I ducked around Angels, moving as fast as I could, never looking back. Perhaps it was the recollection of that kiss we shared on the couch the last time we were together, before making love in her apartment, that fettered me, however, the one during our viewing of "Dracula." I saw her in the hot lines of the television, scanning electrons forming a haptic vampire, dead bride in white lace, powerful fangs ringed with voluptuous, blood red lips of desire. I recalled the gravity of Amy's kiss, each drawn out with a greater intensity of desire to fuck her, and the glimpsed look of shock on the vampire Lucy's face, caught suddenly in the coordinate grid of the cross (to say nothing of the scanning projection of CRT, that mesh work of fishnet gestalt, begging for completion, there in the horizontal, the vertical). I wanted to touch her teeth, to insert my thumbs into her mouth and feel their contours again as she climaxed, feel her reality.

The vampiric Angel gaze did not relent. After a few flights, I felt myself resolve slip. I was paralyzed again on the lower landing. I looked up, and where before there had been three or four now there were five or six Angels. I looked down and there was a hoard of Angels. It was too late. I would certainly die here—worse than that, I would fall into a discontinuity in space. Like falling into a rift of pure time-energy. It would be like having never existed at all. I would be utterly annihilated.

And then it occurred to me, that was precisely the problem. It had been the problem with her and why I'd lost her, and why I'd been unable to show kindness. It was the same problem at the root of being unable to subsequently reach out to her and say 'I'm sorry.'

It was my total paralysis, succumbing to inaction. It wasn't the Doctor who was at risk of becoming an Angel—it was _me_.

There on the stairwell, there was no other place to run. It was an inescapable, three-dimensional matrix of terror. The fact of the matter was plain enough. I would die. They were advancing on all sides and I could not maintain my gaze in all directions.

So I lay down on the landing with the weird light streaming in through the window in despair, waiting for the inevitable. I closed my eyes as Amy had done to stave off the inevitable, but now the Angel was coming from inside too. From every direction, even from within, emerging from the pupil of my eye, itself a void. It's advancing image conjured sensations from those days and nights spent lamenting my loss of Amy, when I imagined that secret dark place inside that only she knew. Was it the same cold darkness that I felt those many days and nights spent lamenting her loss? Where, in trying to empathize with her, I felt I telescoped down to into her soul, to find her (in a parallel to the Angel emerging from my pupil), down to that secret place, and tried to feel what she felt.

It occurred to me what the Doctor had said. The implications were chilling. I could feel the Angel coming from inside, from the darkness and nothing at the center of my pupil, I realized that it was me. _I _was the Angel. And it wasn't simply that I was becoming one: I had _always_ been an Angel, masquerading as a human.

I could see the Angel coming, through all of that blackness, and the cold. The closed eyes didn't seem to help at all. I felt I might drown in my despair and I was terrified as I had only been in my loneliest lonely, my darkest hour. With closed eyes I drew a breath. I would be killed at any moment. All I could think of was her, like a quaking manifold dancing from out of her darkest despair. But I realized I could not hold on. All at once I could hear her serenely coaxing me to be calm. She was not afraid. Why should I be?

Closing my eyes had not stopped the Angel. It had come; it had become me, and now I was an Angel, and I now I knew how it felt to be an Angel. It was the worst feeling of loneliness imaginable. It was a terror that I felt when trying to comprehend the way she felt, and when I felt I might succumb to the impossibility of the desire I felt. But that was just selfish—it had nothing to do with her experience, and everything to do with mine—my doubt, my paralysis, _my fear_. I had to let that go. Empathy failed, but I was only human. And so, if I was now an Angel, now that I knew how it felt to be one of the loneliest creatures in the universe, to never see or interact with any species, to be unobserved, even by yourself, and to occupy the coldest recesses of creation, in a zero kelvin vacuum longing only and like a vampire for any time-energy, the only true warmth a creature such as that might receive, I heard her voice again, that serene voice:

Amy whispered to me, and I could almost feel her lips brushing my ear. "Let me go," she said.

So I did the only thing I could. I opened my eyes, my new, unblinking eyes. Gaze of stone. I saw them all, and we all froze forever.

**VI**

I was fine. I awoke in my own living room, TV still on, an episode of the Graham Norton show featuring Katy Perry. I was in my own time again. This life, I thought, was just the dream of an Angel, perhaps, frozen in the deadlocked stare with another Angel. It was a possibility that would haunt me. It would haunt my dreams. Just like her. But I had to let go.

I had held them off long enough to for Amy and Rory to complete the paradox. And thinking of this new doctor, I knew I would be his companion. He had made it out of the Winter Quay, no doubt. The universe still existed, after all.

And then one of those strange things happened. I surfed onto the Doctor Who BBC web page and Amy—my Amy, the real Amy—showed up in a YouTube video, walking with Arthur Darvill through central park during her trip, chatting, carrying Amy and Rory's picnic basket.

I knew she would find a love like that.


	4. Epilogue

Only it wasn't over.

The next time the TARDIS materialized in my midst, I had just arrived home from a long day at work. The Florida sky was grey and it had been drizzling for days. The palms shifted in the breeze high above.

The door of the TARDIS was left ajar where it had materialized on the front lawn of my humble little duplex. I entered to find him again hovering over the controls of the Victorian console, cast against the obsidian walls with their circular recesses, pulsating with some inscrutable energy. His gaunt form was draped in a long dark coat and a purple vest. He removed a silver pocket watch from his vest, examined it with seriousness, and then he smoothed back his white hair.

"I knew it. I knew that you survived," I said.

"Only nearly. You did well to hold off the brood of Angels as long as you did. Without your help we wouldn't have been able to pull off the paradox."

"So, I've redeemed myself?"

"I'd say we are even," he said with zero intonation.

After a pause, I asked, "I'll never see Amy again, will I?"

His grey eyes did not soften as he regarded the controls. He no longer smiled.

"It's for the best."

I hung my head. I recalled the medieval haiku,_ But oh! The sadness I would feel, the time I realized the lifetimes between us._

"I like coming back to the Space Coast around the time they discontinued the Shuttle," he said suddenly, "to a time when Dreams of the Space Age were still not far off, when there was still hope for something greater. Remember before you asked what it was like—the world, the universe in the time of my thirteenth incarnation?"

"You said millennia were not so much greater than years."

"The universe is far darker than you can imagine," came his reply.

I kept silent.

"Come with me," he said. "You'll never see her again. But you can come with me and assist me in a time when things are not so kind. Far into the future. What do you say?"

The wind whipped through the palms, slamming the front door, scattering papers across an empty lawn from a car door left open; the incessant ping.


End file.
